Parma giant Roche plans to maintain an outpost in North Jersey for quite awhile.

It turns out that Roche has taken a five-year lease for its new satellite office at Overlook at Great Notch in Little Falls. The drug maker has leased roughly 18,000 square feet at the office building, which is on a hill above Route 46 right before its junction with Route 3.

Earlier this week I reported that Roche had taken the space, where it plans to relocate some employees from its soon-to-be-shuttered research facility, which straddles Nutley and Clifton. But when I filed that story, I hadn’t heard from Roche yet the lengh of the lease.

Since then Roche spokesperson Darien Wilson provided the lease length. She also said that the drug maker had looked at several other towns for its satellite office, including Clifton, Lyndhurst and Short Hills.

By year-end Roche will cease operations at its 119-acre campus on Route 3 east. By the end of the year, about 50 workers who were doing corporate functions will be relocating to Overlook at Great Notch.

Those include folks in the areas of law, corporate environmental & safety affairs, funds management, benefits, IT, corporate relations along with a few others.

Another 200 of the 1,000 employees who had been working at Roche will be going to the company’s new state-of-art research facility in Manhattan.